Blorum.info: A blog+forum for Intermediates and experts. This blog is a discussion, often with myself, about how the digital media industry functions. Since you've wandered in, feel free to share some thoughts as comments on the blog. You might find a few insights. Please share a few too.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

More on whats a scam, whats legit?

I received this helpful email the other day. Since I had recently registered educational-games.info, I guess they figured I was a good candidate....

Subject: Re: educational-games.netHi, educational-games.net will expire within a few days, the previous owner has failed to renew it in time.If you are the previous owner then I am pleased to have brought this to your attention. We offer a no win no fee service whereby we will attempt to acquire this domain for you within less than 1 second of it being released to the general public.There is nothing to pay upfront and if we are not successful then you will not have to pay a penny.

There are 3 levels at which we can try to acquire the domain for you.

Level 1 - We try to register the domain up to 1000 times a second throughout the domains expiry window.We have a 90% (spprox) success rate in acquiring domains with this service. The cost (only if successul is £500 + vat (US$995)

Level 2 - We try to register the domain up to 500 times a second throughout the domains expiry window.We have a 70% (spprox) success rate in acquiring domains with this service.The cost (only if successul is £250 + vat (US$495)

Level 3 - We try to register the domain up to 250 times a second throughout the domains expiry window.We have a 50% (approx) success rate in acquiring domains with this service.The cost (only if successul is £125 + vat (US$250) If you would like us to try to acquire the domain on your behalf or if you have any questions at all, then please get back to me within the next 2 days.You can either reply by email or phone on the numbers below.

I look forward to hearing back from you. Kind Regards Gary Since I did want the domain, I wasn't too sure what to do. I looked inside my Godaddy account and saw that for $18.95 (I'm a member of their more-than-100-domains-special-pricing-club), I could get them to try to get it for me when it expired. There were no details like Gary's about how many hundreds of times per second but I did like the price. Plus, they answer the phones and I've done A LOT of business with them.

Here it is - a week later - and the educational-games.net domain is now mine. With out paying any number of hundreds of dollars. While I don't think Gary was a scam, he was certainly the most expensive way to get the domain. I am grateful that he pointed it out to me. Thank Gary.